


Boundaries

by osprey_archer



Series: Reciprocity [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2018-02-21 04:21:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2454527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Your goal is to replace a world-class assassin with a defective human being? That’s fucking stupid," Bucky said.</i>
</p><p>In which Bucky lies to his therapists, glories in stories of destruction, and finally has an honest conversation with Steve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boundaries

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Барьеры](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5401967) by [Kana_Go](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kana_Go/pseuds/Kana_Go)



“Bucky!” Steve yelled, and tossed his coat into the closet with such force that all the hangers rattled. “Bucky! Where the hell are you?” 

Bucky didn’t answer. Typical. 

“I’ve been talking to Dr. Charles,” Steve said, stomping into the living room. Bucky sat on the couch, ignoring him, and it made Steve want to grab his shoulders and shake him till his teeth rattled. Bucky would probably hit him. They might get into a fight. Right now that sounded almost fun. 

Steve restrained himself. “Apparently you’ve been wasting your sessions making up a whole string of stories about how we grew up in the world’s worst orphanage, never mind we were never in an orphanage _at all_ , much less an awful one. And _Jesus Christ_ , Bucky, do you know how many SHIELD employees need therapy after their coworkers and friends and lovers turned out to be Hydra moles? And you’re wasting – ”

He sat down next to Bucky on the couch, and for the first time he looked at Bucky’s face. 

Bucky was staring into space, his eyes open and blank. He didn’t move when Steve sat down, not even the tiny shifts that would have signaled that he noticed Steve’s presence. He wasn’t there at all. 

“Bucky?” Steve said, feeling suddenly sick and small. Steve’s shouting probably hadn’t set off the episode – Steve wasn’t sure what caused them – but still. It was so easy to forget, in the face of Bucky’s façade of indestructible callousness, that Bucky really was not well. 

Maybe, after all, Bucky had a good reason to lie to Dr. Charles. Maybe he was just too hurt to face the pain of things that had actually happened. 

“Bucky?” Steve said softly. But Bucky didn’t respond, didn’t even blink, and Steve said, more quietly still, “Soldat.” 

That worked. That always worked. Bucky blinked and stretched and began to say something in Russian. Then his eyes focused on Steve and he segued straight into, “Where’s dinner?” 

“We’ll have to order in,” said Steve. He had stalked straight home after talking to Dr. Charles. 

Bucky frowned. “I’m hungry _now_ ,” he said. 

_Too bad_ , Steve almost said. He struggled to hold on to the kindly feeling he’d had for Bucky when Bucky had been sitting there catatonic ten seconds ago, but it was already leaching away. 

“I’ve been talking to Dr. Charles,” Steve said instead. 

“Yeah?” said Bucky. 

“He suggested I should consider therapy,” Steve said. “Because I had such a traumatic childhood at the orphanage.” 

Bucky laughed so hard that he fell off the couch. “He believed it!” Bucky crowed.

So much for being in too much pain to deal with reality. Maybe he just thought lying was fucking hilarious. 

“He really, really believed it! I thought for sure he’d catch on when I told him how the headmaster threw you out the window.”

“What?” said Steve. 

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said. “You broke your tibia. The bone jutted out through the skin and everything. I had to carry you everywhere for three weeks. Of course the orphanage didn’t get you proper medical care.”

Steve could only stare at him. It was one thing to hear Dr. Charles’ hint that Bucky had told some pretty ghastly stories about Steve’s childhood, and maybe Steve should get some help for his childhood trauma; another thing entirely to hear Bucky describe Steve’s imaginary suffering with the same gleeful relish that he told Steve about his assassinations. 

“Or there was the time they made you kneel in the courtyard,” Bucky said. “For two hours. In the middle of winter. The warden threw a bucket of water on you. You really shouldn’t have sassed him, Stevie. But you never knew when to quit.” 

“Are you sure this isn’t something that happened to you?” Steve asked. It sounded like something Hydra might do to a recalcitrant weapon. 

“You’re not _listening_ ,” Bucky said, annoyed. “It happened to you. Your lips were blue when they brought you in. I thought they were maybe going to leave you there to die. I was watching the whole time, from up in the attic.”

How much must Bucky hate Steve, to invent a story where he watched Steve slowly freeze to death for _two hours_? 

“And your knees were all torn up, too, from kneeling on the gravel – I could see the blood on the gravel for weeks when we lined up for calisthenics, ‘cause it never rained. And you should have lost a couple toes to frostbite, but even that idiot doctor could look up your medical files and see you’ve got all your toes. Maybe I could’ve told him the super serum grew them back, though.” He knocked his knuckles against his metal arm. It made a hollow thunking sound. He laughed. “You got the better version, after all. Have you ever lost a limb? Do you know if it would regrow?” 

Steve really didn’t want Bucky getting ideas in his head about experiments. “No,” he said sharply. “It wouldn’t.” 

“Guess it’s good I left your toes on, then,” Bucky said. “I had to sneak you into the teachers’ bathroom, ‘cause we only had cold showers, and that wouldn’t – ”

“Bucky,” Steve interrupted. “You realize how traumatized most SHIELD employees are, right? Because their teammates and friends turned out to be Hydra? There are lots of people who need help who can’t get it because so many of our therapists were turncoats, too, and you’re seeing Dr. Charles three times a week and you’re _wasting his time_.”

“I’m saving the rest of them for having to deal with that quack,” Bucky said. But he had lost all interest in the conversation: he was fidgeting, glancing back at the kitchen. “What are we having for dinner?” 

“Leftovers,” said Steve. 

“I _hate_ leftovers.”

“Tough.” 

“They made us eat a lot of leftovers at the – ”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Steve said, which shut Bucky up, at least for a while. 

But nothing could shut him up permanently, and for weeks afterward he popped up intermittently with stories about horrible things that happened to Steve at the orphanage. Steve hadn’t thought there was anything worse than Bucky’s assassination stories, but at least Steve wasn’t the one being chucked down the stairs by a group of bullies in those. 

“And I had to fend them off with a baseball bat, or probably they would have kicked you to death,” Bucky informed Steve, digging into his pancakes with great satisfaction. “You broke three ribs falling down the stairs.”

Do not engage. Do not engage. Do not engage. “Are there any bones in my body that didn’t get broken in the orphanage?” Steve asked. 

Bucky took another strip of bacon as he considered. “Your hands,” he said, and crunched down on the bacon. “They never did anything to your hands.”

“Oh, good,” Steve said.

“Or not the bones in them, anyway. The skin cracked when they made you wash the floors with lye soap, on your hands and knees, in the middle of winter.” The orphanage seemed to exist in a state of perpetual winter. “You almost died of pneumonia. Remember how I snuck into the infirmary to read to you?” 

“Bucky, you realize you made this all up, right?” Steve snapped. 

“Of course.” Bucky sounded annoyed. 

“So of course I don’t remember it!” 

“But I _did_ read to you when you were sick,” Bucky said. He sopped up syrup with a piece of pancake. “Only you couldn’t read to me when I was sick, because any bug that knocked me down would probably kill you.” 

And that threw Steve for a loop. “That happened,” he said. Bucky did used to read to Steve; and when Bucky caught the flu when they were ten, and when Steve showed up at Bucky’s door with a book, Bucky’s mother gently but firmly turned him away with almost those exact words. Steve went home and sat on the fire escape and felt like an absolute zero of a friend. “You remember that?” 

“You complained because I couldn’t do character voices in _Treasure Island_. I was _eight_ ,” said Bucky. “I could barely read. You were a demanding little shit.”

Steve almost laughed, because it was such a relief to hear Bucky talking about something real. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe a little bit.” 

Bucky crunched through another strip of bacon. Steve began to get his appetite for his pancake back. He took up his knife and fork. “The orphanage didn’t have any books,” Bucky said dreamily. “So I had to read to you out of newspapers. It was all about stockbrokers jumping off the Chrysler building that week.” 

Steve put his knife and fork down again. “How’s your new therapist?” he asked. 

“She’s great. We’re talking about Hydra stuff and everything,” Bucky said breezily. “If you’re not going to eat your pancake, can I have it?” 

“Fine,” said Steve, and pushed his chair away from the table. There was no reason to waste food. And at least Bucky had _asked_. 

***

“So after Dr. Charles, SHIELD sent him to another therapist,” Steve said. He stirred his coffee, although the sugar had long since dissolved. “He told her about how Hydra sent him to the moon to shoot aliens. Cold and dark and lonely up there. Apparently.” 

“It sounds like a metaphor,” Sam said. 

“Maybe.” Steve poked at his dissected croissant. 

“For the emotional isolation of being the Winter Soldier?” Sam suggested.

“Maybe,” Steve said again. “If Bucky cares about that.” He stared down in his coffee. “I’m not sure he has feelings anymore,” Steve confessed. “He’s so callous, and I don’t… know how to deal with it.” He felt obscurely traitorous, telling this to Sam, even though he knew Bucky wouldn’t give a damn. Bucky didn’t feel at all ashamed of being a killing machine. He strutted about it like a peacock.

Just thinking about it made Steve lose his appetite for the croissant. “I don’t know what to do about it. He’s told me the same story about stabbing a gulag commander with an icicle at least five times now. Or he’s tried to. He keeps laughing so hard he can’t finish it.” 

“Hysterics?” Sam asked. 

_God, I wish_ , Steve thought, although surely he shouldn’t wish that on Bucky. “No. He thinks this story is _hilarious_. He thinks they’re all hilarious, all his stories about killing people.” Steve tapped his fingernails against the rim of his coffee cup. “He keeps telling them to me,” he said, staring down into the dark coffee. “Over and over again.” 

“It could be a way to process trauma,” Sam said. 

“I guess,” Steve said. “But the only evidence for that is that I want it to be. I think he honestly thinks his stories are hilarious. He just can’t see why I don’t agree. And sometimes I – ” This was also something he shouldn’t say to Sam, but now that he’d started the sentence, he couldn’t hold it back. “Sometimes I think he’s just lying to me too,” Steve said. “That he makes some of these stories up just because he knows they bother me.” He pushed the plate away. “But maybe that’s paranoid. I need to stop letting it bother me. Everything would be okay if I just didn’t let it bother me anymore.”

“Steve,” said Sam. He was looking at Steve intently, and Steve felt suddenly so pathetically grateful to be talking to someone who actually cared that he had to wrap his hands around his coffee cup to still his sudden sense of vertigo. “We need to talk about boundaries.” 

“I don’t think Bucky has a problem with boundaries,” Steve said. “He’s all about boundaries. I don’t think I’ve seen him let them down, not once, not even – ”

 _When he comes,_ Steve almost said. But he hadn’t told Sam that he and Bucky were having sex (if it could even be called that), and he didn’t think Sam would approve; and anyway it was too humiliating to explain. 

“No, I agree. Bucky’s boundaries are fine. Bucky’s boundaries are a suit of armor. If he wants therapy to be any help, he’s going to need to break them down a bit. But – ” 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to try to break his boundaries down,” Steve said. Not to mention that it was probably impossible. If he’d maintained them through everything that Hydra did, Steve sure wasn’t going to make any headway.

“I’m not talking about Bucky’s boundaries,” Sam cut in. “I’m talking about yours.” 

“Oh.”

“I know you want to be there for him, and that’s admirable. But if you try to be there for him 24/7 and don’t set any boundaries, you’re going to burn yourself out and you won’t be able to deal with him anymore. That won’t be good for him or for you. And if the only way you think you can deal with him is to try not to have any feelings, you’re already burning out.”

“Oh,” Steve said again, and stared down into his coffee. An oily film had developed over the surface. 

“Think about it,” Sam said. 

***

Steve tried not to think about it. He was used to the new Bucky by now: the callousness, the abrasiveness, the general expectation that other people (Steve, in particular) existed to wait on him hand and foot, none of these things surprised him any longer. And if he expected them, then they didn’t hurt. Or at least, they didn’t hurt as much. 

It wasn’t until Prague that Steve snapped. 

The mission was supposed to be a milk run, just a quick information retrieval at a Hydra base that was supposedly unguarded. Of course it wasn’t. 

That shouldn’t have surprised Steve, either. SHIELD never wasted Bucky on a mission where there was no one to shoot. 

At least it was only three people this time, and only one of them died in a way that Bucky deemed “entertaining.” 

“Shut _up_!” Steve finally yelled, as soon as he was sure they didn’t have anyone on their tail. “And aim for the chest in the future! Even you don’t make head shots every time, and someday one of our own is going to get killed because you missed!” 

It was a direct order, so Bucky shut up. He didn’t even defend the accuracy of his head shots, just sulked silently all the way to the safe house. Steve used to feel bad about ordering Bucky around like that. But now, with a tension headache pounding behind his brow, he was mostly just relieved that the car was silent aside from the sound of the rain. 

They got to the safe house near dawn, although it still seemed like midnight in the rain. It looked like a deserted wreck from the outside, with a dangerously askew porch rail and a gaping hole in the mossy red-tiled roof. 

But the room under the intact portion of the roof was clean and enclosed and well-stocked with kindling, if nothing else. Bucky commandeered the only blanket, lit the wood fire in the enormous tiled stove, and huddled up against it to get warm. 

At least he hadn’t started complaining that he was hungry yet. Steve poked through the rusty stock of canned goods, his mind drifting nostalgically to the days when SHIELD provided cars with working heaters, and safe houses had electricity and refrigerators and supplies of dry clothes laid in. 

Back when SHIELD was little more than a shell around the rotting core of Hydra. So much for nostalgia. 

One of the cans of soup looked slightly less rusty than the others. Steve grabbed the soup can and a pan and took them over to the stove. Bucky scooted sideways to give Steve room to cook. Steve set the pan on the hearth, in close to the fire, then looked down at the smooth can. Oh. A can-opener. “Fifteen cans and no can-opener,” Steve said, and he was so tired that it made him laugh a little. 

Bucky snatched the can from Steve’s hand. He took off his glove, punched through the can lid with a metal finger and handed the can back to Steve. “Or you can do that,” Steve said, pouring the soup in the pot. Bucky grinned up at him. 

Usually a grin from Bucky made Steve feel better. But Steve was so tired that it barely registered. “I’m going to see if I can find water and more kindling,” Steve said, and clomped off. 

He found a pump and another pile of kindling in a back room. The roof only leaked a little, but one of those leaks dripped directly ran down Steve’s back as he scraped the rusty pump handle up and down. It took ages to half-fill the pail, and the flakes of rust floated in the water. Bucky would hate that. 

_Good_ , thought Steve, and he was so tired that he could barely muster any guilt at the spiteful thought. Bucky hadn’t even gotten up to help pump the water. He deserved to be unhappy about _something_. He sure wasn’t unhappy that they’d shot three people that night. 

When Steve hauled the bucket back to the stove, he found Bucky eating the soup right out of the pan. Bucky looked up, slurping noodles off his chin with a noise that Steve could only consider taunting. “ _Bucky_ ,” Steve said. 

“I saved you some,” said Bucky, and nudged forward a steaming bowl with one foot. 

Steve lowered himself stiffly to the floor. He picked up the bowl and spoon, but the warmth of the fire only seemed to make him colder: suddenly he started to shiver so hard that he had to set the soup aside so he wouldn’t slop it on the floor. Bucky watched him shiver silently, spooning the last of the noodles out of the pot, then drinking the broth out of the bottom. 

Then he set aside the empty pan, unwrapped his blanket from his shoulders, and tossed it over to Steve. 

Steve clutched at the warm blanket as if it were a life preserver. “Won’t you be cold?” he asked. 

Bucky had already draped himself, catlike, across the warm tiles of the hearth. “No,” he said, and tugged on Steve’s hand to come over and lie down next to him. Never mind his soup would get cold. 

Steve felt a wave of absolute exhaustion pass over him – not physical exhaustion, but mental exhaustion. Cuddling with Bucky only ever ended one way. Steve had gotten used to a lot of things about the new Bucky, but he hadn’t gotten used to being a fucking sex toy. “No.” 

Bucky scowled. He tugged again, more insistently. 

Steve jerked his hand back. “Let _go_ ,” Steve said, and Bucky didn’t just let go; he actually shoved Steve away, hard enough that Steve slid over to the opposite wall. It drove the wind out of him. For a moment he couldn’t get his breath, and he felt like a child again, choking on his own attempts to breathe. 

Bucky was on his feet now, his back against the wall: positioned for a fight. Steve stood up slowly, palms out to show that he didn’t plan to rush Bucky as soon as he got up. He didn’t know quite what he planned to do when he got up, except that he needed to be elsewhere, as far away from Bucky as possible.

Unfortunately that wasn’t very far. He could hardly abandon Bucky mid-mission. 

He went out to the porch. The light rain blew against his face as he stood on the porch, seeping through his clothes until he was soaked through and very, very cold. 

The hinges squeaked behind him. Bucky had followed him to the porch. 

He never knew when to quit. 

_I could do this all day_ , Steve thought, and felt suddenly unbearably tired again. Sure, for a day he could take anything. A week even. A year, though? For the rest of his life? 

Sam was right. Something had to give, or Steve was going to snap. 

Bucky came up beside him. “We fulfilled our mission objective,” he said. 

Before he even consciously processed the words, Steve was on the other end of the porch. It was bad enough hearing Bucky giggle about people he had killed decades ago, let alone the ones they killed last night. 

And of course that made talking about it the perfect way for Bucky to punish Steve. 

“We completed the mission,” Bucky persisted. “So it’s not fair for you to punish me.”

 _Oh_. Oh thank God, Bucky didn’t want to talk about the guy whose head exploded. “I’m not punishing you,” Steve said. 

Bucky snorted. 

“For Christ’s sake, Bucky,” Steve said. “I just can’t go on having this completely one-sided – I mean, for most things that’s okay. But not for this. I just can’t do this anymore.” 

He expected another derisive snort, but Bucky was looking at him intently, frowning. At least he was taking this seriously. “So what do you want?” Bucky asked. “You want me to touch you?”

“No,” said Steve, and it wasn’t even entirely untrue: he didn’t want Bucky to touch him if it was just a physical thing. 

Bucky’s eyebrows scrunched together. “Then what do you _want_?” 

“I want you to care!” said Steve, and looked away from Bucky, because if Bucky looked derisive then he didn’t want to see it. The rain fell so hard over the fields that it looked like fog, and he couldn’t see the distant mountains through that mist. 

Bucky’s voice was so quiet that Steve almost didn’t hear him above the clatter of the rain on the tiled roof behind them. “I do care,” Bucky said. 

Steve glanced at him. Bucky was also staring out over the fields, and when he felt Steve’s eyes on him, he turned away a little more. “I believe you,” Steve said, because he did: because Bucky hadn’t killed him on the helicarrier, and Bucky had saved his life at least twice on missions since then, and because occasionally (very occasionally) Bucky would do things like save him soup or share a blanket. 

But that wasn’t enough to make up for the fact that it was damn hard living with Bucky. “I just need you to act on that a little more, Buck.” 

Bucky had now twisted his face entirely away from Steve. Raindrops dripped off the ends of his ponytail. “I don’t know how to do that,” Bucky muttered. 

Steve wanted very badly to put a hand on his shoulder, to comfort him. He had to knot his hands together behind his back to stop himself. “That’s okay,” said Steve. “It’s something you can learn.” 

Bucky shook his head. He let go of the railing suddenly, moving his arm in a nervous, purposeless motion. “I can’t,” he said. 

_Of course you can!_ , Steve wanted to say, but he had no idea if that were true. “You can try,” he said. 

“No, I _can’t_.”

“Why not?’

“Because I can’t!” Bucky’s voice rose. 

Steve’s voice rose too. “Why not?” 

“Because what if it works!” Bucky yelled, and slammed the heel of his hand against the porch rail. The wood cracked under his hand. 

Steve stepped back a little. “You think that would be a bad thing?” Steve said, to make sure he understood Bucky correctly. 

“I’d be like a normal person again,” said Bucky. He said _normal person_ as if it were _dirty sock_. 

The rain had slowed. Steve could see the mountains again. “Yes, that’s…the goal, actually,” Steve said. 

“Your goal is to replace a world-class assassin with a defective human being? That’s fucking stupid.” 

“You’re not – ” Steve began heatedly. But Bucky was smirking, and Steve stopped himself. He could hardly argue that Bucky was doing just fine at the whole human being thing: they wouldn’t have been having this conversation if he was. 

Steve changed tacks. “You know I’ll love you even if you’re not the best assassin in the world, right?” 

“I know you’d love me a lot more if I weren’t,” Bucky shot back. He was staring at the fields again. A white after-rain fog rose off the dark earth. “SHIELD wouldn’t be happy, though.” 

Of course he was right. SHIELD wouldn’t like it: SHIELD had plenty of uses for Bucky, just the way he was. “SHIELD can go fuck itself,” Steve said.

That startled a laugh out of Bucky, even as he clamped his hand over Steve’s mouth. “Shut up,” he said. “Shut up shut up shut _up_ , they’ll hear.” 

Steve stepped away. “Look, Bucky,” Steve said. “Like you said, SHIELD likes you fine like you are, so… If you don’t want to… if you think you’re fine the way you are. Maybe I should stop trying to make you change.” Steve had to stop talking, because his throat had closed up. His best friend was gone, and he didn’t want to come back. 

Bucky eyed him for a long time. “Really?” he said. 

“Yes,” said Steve. “Except – ”

“Of course there’s an exception,” Bucky said. 

“I need you to stop telling me all those stories about the people you killed, the gulag commander and the guy in Tblisi and, God help me, Howard Stark. I know you think they’re hilarious, but I don’t, and I can’t deal with hearing them anymore.”

“But you need to hear them,” Bucky said. 

“No, I really don’t! You’ve told them all to me already!” 

“Yeah, but they’re not sinking in. Every time you kill someone you mope about it for weeks,” Bucky said. 

Steve stared at him. “And you want me to… start… laughing about it?” he said, speaking slowly because he was having trouble formulating the thought. 

“Yes!” said Bucky, and gave one of his rare smiles. At last his dull pupil had caught on. “You can’t keep torturing yourself about it or you’re going to go nuts. Killing people is our _job_.”

“No,” said Steve. “Our job is to protect people. And sometimes that means killing people who are trying to cause mayhem and destruction, but death isn’t ultimately our goal.” 

Bucky opened his mouth to reply, frowned, and closed his mouth. His brow knit thoughtfully. Then, with considerably less vehemence, he said, “But killing people is still a big part of it. And you have to admit, the way that guy’s head exploded in the warehouse back there was – ”

“Bucky,” Steve said. He wasn’t sure why he even bothered objecting. Bucky never listened. “I really don’t want to hear you describe it. Again.” 

And Bucky, to Steve’s surprise, fell silent. He flicked a flake of paint off the cracked porch railing into a puddle below. Then he said, “I guess if you think you’re fine, I shouldn’t try to make you change, either.” 

“Thank you,” Steve said wryly. 

“You’re still gonna go nuts, though,” Bucky said. 

“Probably,” said Steve. He shifted away from the porch railing. His feet squelched in his soaking shoes. “Let’s go inside and get warm.” 

***

Bucky didn’t settle in front of the fire again. He wrung out his wet clothes and changed into dry ones from the duffel bag Steve retrieved from the car, and watched while Steve ate his lukewarm soup. But when Steve looked up at him over the soup bowl, Bucky turned away and began to pace the little room. 

That wasn’t like him. Usually Bucky flung himself into the most comfortable spot in any room, and stayed there until he wanted something. 

Probably he wasn’t quite sure how to act now. Steve wasn’t sure, either, and the commonality of feeling gave him a sudden rush of warmth toward Bucky. Maybe now that they were both off-script, they could finally make some progress. 

He put aside his empty soup bowl and scooted as close to the fire as he could stand. Bucky liked to be warm. “Why don’t you come sit down?” he suggested, wording it carefully to make it absolutely clear it wasn’t an order. 

The problem with non-orders was that Bucky generally ignored them. He continued to pace. His whole body was tense as a coiled spring, like he was holding off the shivers by sheer force of will.

“Come on, Buck, why don’t you come over here and get warm?” said Steve. The gentleness of his own voice surprised him. For a long time he had been too irritated with Bucky to speak to him so kindly. 

Bucky stopped pacing in the middle of the room. He looked at Steve’s face for a long time, wearing that unreadable half-angry deadpan that was his default expression. His jaw tightened, then loosened again, and his face and shoulders both seemed to sag. His head bowed, just a little. 

That wasn’t like him at all. It alarmed Steve, and as Bucky crossed the room and dropped down on his knees beside him, Steve had a sudden flash of insight: if Bucky had been summoning Steve over to cuddle, Bucky would have meant it as a sort of code for _I want you to get me off_. 

Clearly Bucky wasn’t happy about it, and just as clearly he meant to go through with it, if Steve insisted. Given Bucky’s usual indifference to the desires of anyone but himself, Steve found it weirdly endearing. 

Not nearly as endearing as he found it frightening, though. Maybe Sam was wrong about the whole setting boundaries thing. Maybe Steve had just managed to crack Bucky even more. 

“No, like this,” he said, and gently maneuvered Bucky so their bodies formed a T-shape, with Bucky’s head on his stomach. It wasn’t going to warm them up much, but at least it wasn’t a position that said _I expect you to apologize to me with sexual favors_. 

Bucky lay very still for a little while. But when Steve didn’t do anything, he rolled on his side to look up into Steve’s face. It must have been uncomfortable: he was lying on his metal arm with his back to the fire. 

Bucky was very good at eye contact. A little too good at eye contact: he could stare down anyone. He once stared down Natasha, which Steve had previously thought impossible. 

But for once Bucky was merciful. He searched Steve’s face for a while, and then, just when Steve was about to wriggle out of his skin with embarrassment, Bucky tucked his cheek down against Steve’s stomach. “You can stroke my hair,” Bucky offered. “If you want.” 

Steve smiled ruefully. It was so like Bucky, making up with Steve by getting Steve to do something for him. 

Then again, he had clearly put some thought into coming up with something Steve would enjoy as much as he did. So maybe that was progress. 

Steve teased his fingers through Bucky’s hair. It was still wet and clumpy from the rain, and Bucky’s forehead creased briefly as Steve smoothed out the tangles, although Steve tried to be gentle. 

But the tangles came undone swiftly, and Bucky’s forehead smoothed too. He closed his eyes, pressing his cheek into Steve’s stomach as Steve stroked his hair. His breath was warm on Steve’s ribcage. He lifted his hand to Steve’s shirt, bunching the fabric in his fingers; and he fell asleep like that, with his fist pressed against Steve’s heartbeat. 

Steve let him sleep for a little while: probably much longer than he ought to, in fact. But when the fire faded and the cold began to press into the house again, he gave Bucky a little shake. “We need to get moving,” he said. “We ought to check in with SHIELD.” 

Bucky blinked sleepily at Steve. Then his gaze sharpened. He sat up and rubbed his face, and gathered up his sopping armor without another look at Steve. “Of course,” he said. “We’re wasting time. Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to littlerhymes for betaing this!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Boundaries](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4158744) by [iwillnotbecaged (rachelheather)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelheather/pseuds/iwillnotbecaged)




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